Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris
Wesley Morris is an American journalist and Critic at Large for the New York Times. Morris is a former full-time writer for the website Grantland. He won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Criticism for his 2011 work with The Boston Globe--the fifth film critic to win the award--citing "his smart, inventive film criticism, distinguished by pinpoint prose and an easy traverse between the art house and the big-screen box office"...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
CountryUnited States of America
superhero age eras
I definitely have a kind of Stockholm Syndrome for superhero movies because it's very clear that's the era we're in. It's like Christianity in the Middle Ages.
patience perception youth
In movies, there are some things the French do that Americans are increasingly incapable of doing. One is honoring the complexities of youth. It's a quiet, difficult undertaking, requiring subtlety in a filmmaker and perception and patience from us.
race people feel-good
The problem with a lot of movies when it comes to race is that they want to be moral, and they want to make the audience feel good about something that a lot of people don't feel good about.
risk world want
There comes a point in your moviegoing life where you look at the screen and then you look at the world and you ask, 'What is going on?' You want the movies to show you the chaos and mess and risk and failure that are normal for a lot of us. Generally, the movies hide all of that.
poor-decisions luck horror
Poor decisions and bad luck are contingencies of most horror films.
cheer people six
Polisse' is the sort of cop thriller where people do things like angrily bang on a desktop or sweep everything off it. If it happens once, it must happen six times. But every time it did, I wanted to stand up and cheer, which I've never wanted to do for any such thriller.
criticism social critics
I like Nora Ephron. She wasn't a critic in the strictest sense of the word, but she did a lot of social criticism. She was so funny and so in the right place at the right time.
apples people use
In the Mac vs. PC ads, Apple bills itself as the antidote to Microsoft. To love Apple wasn't to sell out. It was to buy in. Most people use PCs, but Apple has the mindshare.
nice gauges needs
I don't need the audience, but sometimes it's nice to have a gauge - not so I know how I feel, but so I get what is or isn't working for moviegoers.
persistence white maintenance
Straight white males: that's the predominant moviegoing category, and the persistence of that is a dismaying maintenance of the status quo.
humanity way humans
I'm a human who is aware of the history of humanity and the ways in which the movies touch on those things.
responsibility ideas black
All critics have the responsibility to tease out the social ideas and social problems in a movie. I don't feel an obligation to do that because I'm black.
caring thinking people
I don't see a lot of studio executives caring at all about what the culture is telling us. They think they make the culture. They're not out taking the temperature of things and using the results of whatever sort of cultural surveying they're doing to make movies. They're interested in doing things that people are already comfortable with, and taking those properties and filling them.
sad-love gay two
Brokeback Mountain is a sad love story about two people who can't be together, and the reason that they can't be together is because being gay is a stigmatized thing. It would be interesting to have the same movie in which the two guys weren't in the closet and there was no shame about them being gay and they couldn't be together for other reasons. I still feel like we're a long way from that happening.